stratvox

The real answer to tinder plugs is to stop chopping up cedar except in dire emergencies. They wear your tool down for less reward; reserve your hatchet to chop up fir. And self defence, of course. Chopping cedar is the number one source of tinder plug proliferation. In my view, the one change I'd maybe like to see to firestarting is that tinder adds to the chance to light a fire after level 3, but is no longer required to be able to even try to start the fire. Drop all the base chances to start the fire by one in twenty and have the presence of tinder contribute that one in twenty back to the fire starting chance. Have it continue to do so while no longer required (level 3 and up), but allow the player to try and start the fire at the lower chance of success. The weights are a thing that are part of the magical realism of this game. Just like aurora powering up computers and lights and radios and radio stations (!), aurora driving predators crazy, fires set outdoors lasting longer when the temperature is colder, fire in Mountaineer's lasting longer because it's burning while you happen to be outside where it's cold, unheated buildings maintaining a constant temperature just below freezing when it's forty below outside... need I go on? I mean, the buildings, that's second law of thermodynamics right there, doesn't get much more outside of reality than that. They're there to be learned and exploited, to make life easier for your survivor. And there are ones that flip the script, like OMB and the crafted wound dressings. Given the time frame for infection to set in, crafting omb into the dressing after the mauling and bandaging so you can apply is not a major issue, so long as you have enough omb on you... and if you leave them uncrafted you can carry more omb which means you're able to carry more dressings, so the knowledge does help you. It's up to the player to notice and figure them out.

At the moment it appears that the timer on them starts when you enter a region for the first time; I've seen how all the ravaged carcasses are gone after a few days in; I've got a guy in HRV and all the carcasses went away a few days after entering the region. I'm pretty sure this is a bug and I believe Hinterland officially knows about it.

Dry like the Gobi Desert seems to be the consensus.

Oh I hear you there. I'd love it if the game could model real snowfall, with drifts and everything. It'd add a whole new level of challenge to the game. Waking up and needing to dig out from the Camp Office because a big snowdrift blew up against the front of the building overnight during the blizzard. Turn snowshoes into a real thing that would matter. Or Ice Age mode, say: the snow once fallen never goes away and as the game progresses all the structures and trees slowly get buried beneath the snow until you're wandering across a barren snowscape. That would be incredible.

I'd be more inclined to think you should look at other programs on the system that might be hitting your CPU hard... HP tends to ship a lot of shovelware on their laptops, and even outright crap like McAfee or Nortons. When I get laptops that are destined for Windows I tend to download the Microsoft image and install that instead of using the software that comes from the manufacturer because the manufacturer's version usually includes a bunch of crappy software. It's just easier than going into the control panel and removing all the crap via add/remove programs... In all seriousness, I bet that your antivirus is looking at the running instance of the game periodically to see if it's being "suspicious" (this is generally referred to as heuristic analysis in the literature); you may find that you can tell it to not bother looking at that program or you can maybe find a better antivirus than the one your using; both mcafee and nortons suck.

Nice, as I recall there's some amazing country up there; been a while since I was up that way (like forty years a while).

This is not a bug, and the game has worked this way for years. It makes sense from a gameplay POV; trying to drag enough fuel into some of those mine worktables to be able to make a really big item like say bear coat would be completely impracticable.

I'm pretty sure that this is a "this game mechanic will blow out our computational complexity so we can't do it" situation.

You in Kingston?

I often leave stores of wood at key locations as I travel through regions... it makes it frustrating when Hinterland needs to tweak a region and moves 'em all into the lost and found boxes The note about a couple of pieces of emergency coal is also well taken, esp when playing with max coldness over time, like in interloper. At the Pensive Pond, I'd've definitely gone for the cave... but I've also had survivors live in that cave for several months at a time (try it it's one of the better locations to live in PV so much wood in the area and good quality fir not that cheap cedar crap ) so I'm intimately familiar with the surroundings. And yeah... PV is pretty much the region where six hours of wood might not be enough to get through a blizzard; pretty much any other region you'd've lived.

I voted for this. Well deserved imho.

Up on Monolith. In the late game that whole plateau suffers from a serious dearth of wildlife; makes it pretty much impossible to live up there for extended stays. Set up and took this one thinking of its utility as wallpaper.

Yeah, mountain lion's are the animal that make the most sense to me too. I also think it'd be pretty cool to have a mode/mod that replaces all the deer with woodland caribou. Keep everything else the same, just ... caribou. I lived for a while in Prince George when I was very young. Whereabouts are you?

If it's ruined by the time you've found it, you're no longer in the early game.

Found a new one; for those that don't know I got the bulk of these off Thomson's twitter account. Here's another aurora painting he did: This one's from 1917. Don't know what it's called.

I play custom, turn wolf population down to low, crank the damage they can inflict, and set wolf fear to max. I also set animal detection to very far and scent factor to maximum. I set all other animal populations to either Voyageur levels or max. This has a few effects. It makes wolf encounters much rarer, because there are a lot fewer of them. They are unpredictable because they will be pulled to you if you're carrying smellies but will often run away after they become aware of you, esp if you have bear coat and bearskin bedroll. When they do end up getting inside your defences and tangling with you, then it's far more serious. Encounters are rarer, unpredictable when they do occur thanks to the wolf fear factor, so the tension remains high. In a lot of ways I'm trying to make them like bears but with decent chances that they won't attack you because even when their population is set to low there are a lot more of them than there are of bears. If you have smellies bears will detect it from amazing distances and come looking for you. Bow hunting deer will be more challenging as they will be pretty far away from you when they scatter. This will also result in animals interacting a LOT more than they do in the standard modes, which opens up many more opportunities for an enterprising greenhorn on GBI to thieve fresh deer off wolves by scaring them away with stones or whatever... because yes, if you bounce a rock off Fido's noggin while they're chowing down on a deer they'll run. The animal interactions can also result in animals moving on from their spawn locations as deer flee chasing wolves or they all run from mr bear and migrating from their spawn positions. I have spent a fair chunk of time over the last year playing with the custom settings to make the game a little more unpredictable, and this seems to work pretty well... and given that the wolves can kick the crap out of you if they /do/ catch you it highly motivates careful gameplay esp in the early game and makes animal encounters of all kinds much more difficult to predict, esp wrt where you have them... but also lets you off the hook enough to keep it interesting. AFAIK this is the closest thing I know of to what you're asking for.

To illustrate what I mean, these two pictures are taken from the same location: With FOV maxed: and with FOV set to min:

I've found that playing with the FoV setting under Options -> Display allows some fun stuff with the screenshots. If you don't know about that setting, you should check it out. Changing it has side effects wrt how far away things get rendered, so remember that if you decide to mix it with actual gameplay and not just for getting that sweet shot.

A fave spot on an early foggy morning.

Thanks

The whole deal here is like that old old adage by Mark Twain about stories: "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Stop thinking physics and start thinking "what makes it cool?" One of the things I get out of the atmosphere of Great Bear is a strong sense of magical realism. So the aurora brings computers back to life, and fires burn longer when it's cold, and if you're inside a building it doesn't matter how cold it gets out, and you can cure dysentery by drinking mushroom tea, and and and... This game has some very clear antecedents in the art style department, and it kind of follows from how early 20th century Canadian art was being that it would also lead to a magical realism sort of existence. I had a huge amount of fun selling a fellow old on the game by showing them a picture of The Indian Church by Emily Carr and then showing them that place in the game. It's enchanting as an echo from his (er, Raph's) predecessors as a British Columbian artist. Emily Carr was the bomb. So many great pictures.

I'm a hundred and seventy days in on a custom, cold and blizzards set to max, voyageur resource base, all afflictions (so predator meat in early game is a gamble), fire doesn't overcome ambient, struggle damage cranked, and animal awareness and scent increase set to max. I just came into Pleasant Valley. Between maximum cold settings and maximum blizzards it's a hell. So much blizzard it makes getting around the region very difficult... PV is big and that allows the blizz setting max opportunity to mess with your life. You get like halfway across the field and all of a sudden all the faraway stuff disappears and thirty seconds later the wind's cranked, you've got all the down arrows on your temp meter, and you can't see sfa. My POV on lower difficulties is that I (when I had No Idea What I Was Doing Back In The Day) successfully passed a night on the ledge up to the summit on TWM, and that was only because I had the bearskin bedroll. I'd ... messed up and got exhausted on the ledge. So, I slept. All night, in one hour shots. If I'd had the bedroll I would've been in trouble, but the bearskin kept me in positive territory all night. When I woke up shortly before dawn my FL was -10, or +2 in the bag. That'd've been -5 with a normal bedroll. The bearskin's ability to open up a far greater number of places one can sleep in relative safety makes it not exactly necessary but really useful.

My personal head-canon on all this is that we're dead and in purgatory. TLD is a very Canadian purgatory.

I take it. It's +12 takes many marginal situations and makes them easily survivable. I don't find its decay rate to be that bad; it's well over a month before you want to even think about repairing, and given the bear population on Great Bear supplying that is not really difficult. I tend to end up having the bear skins pile up anyway. If you have moose on outside (armour, waterproof) and bear on inside for coats, you'll only need a bear skin once every six months or so for the coat. It's relatively high decay rate's not really a big deal. There are a surprisingly large number of nooks and crannies in many of the regions that don't qualify as caves but will offer protection from a blizzard. When you're looking at bunking out in one of those, the bear skin bedroll can make the difference between living and dying. I usually play custom now with blizzards and coldness set to max and yeah... it matters.